I was going to offer up Leinenkugels as a surviving regional option in my mind, but, per Wikipedia, nope. That said, still kept some of it’s OG nature:
The Leinenkugel brewery expanded from its local roots beginning in the 1970s, when it first introduced its light beer.[5][7][8] The family-owned brewery was sold in 1988 to Philip Morris subsidiary Miller Brewing Company in an effort to stay solvent.[5][1][6] In an unprecedented move at the time, Miller kept the Leinenkugel family on to run its operation.[6]
After several attempts to bring the beer to national U.S. markets, Miller succeeded in 2007 with the addition of a Summer Shandy ale to the Leinenkugel product line.[1] The company has since become well known for its sweeter beers and shandies,[1] with nine out of ten shandies consumed in the United States being brewed by Leinenkugel.[6]
On October 11, 2016, SABMiller sold its stake in MillerCoors for around US $12 billion after the company was acquired by Anheuser-Busch InBev, making Molson Coors the sole owner of all Miller brands, including Leinenkugel’s.[9] As of 2016, the brewery has distribution outlets in all 50 states[10][11] and its president is still a family member, Dick Leinenkugel.[6]
It’s not so much that the quality deteriorated, it’s just that after the beer mega corps have bought out so many lesser companies, that’s more beer labels than they have brewing tanks for. So, they pick the middle of a class of beers, brew that, and that’s what goes in the bottle/can, and never mind what’s on the label.
We’ve got at least 14 independent breweries here in our town of ~300k or so (not that you’d know it from the local tourism website, after I took a quick look at it with four breweries outnumbered by other options (tour groups, meaderies, cideries, distilleries, and a winery)).
I live in the Olympia area, and the shut-down brewery has been empty and rotting away for decades now. (Actually two of them, the original brick structure from the brand’s earliest days, and the bigger more modern uglier one.) There are several small craft brewers in town, and at least one of them markets an “Olympia beer” reprise.
There are nearly 9 thousand in the US currently. There are just very few legacy brands among them.
Craft beer pops up around the same time domestic consolidation peaks in the US. Carter legalized home brew, which lead to brewing knowledge not being locked up in conglomerates (and Europe).
It helped fill that same demand for better beer as Imports.
Similar consolidation had (and is often driven by) European companies. InBev is Belgian after all. A similar collapse in many UK breweries triggered CAMRA, which saved and brought back many old regional brands. Even as it formed an early base line for a British craft industry to follow.
You guys didn’t have prohibition, so beer wise at least you didn’t get into the kind of consolidation we saw as early. But it’s progressing RAPIDLY these days.
And prohibition did have major impacts. Particularly when it comes to extreme consolidation in distilleries in Ireland. And while more facilities kept operating, Scottish distilling is highly consolidated.
Which helped for the basis for Diageo, one of the single largest alcohol companies one of the biggest winners in the consolidation game.
I them and Yuengling are the only two legacy brands still under their original ownership.
A fully owned subsidiary of AB/InBev for the last 6 years.
That is probably a subsidiary of Pabst. They bought the remains of Olympia and made a stink about bringing it back. Sort of structured it with a couple other brands to create a sub company with “craft” in the name to make it not look like Pabst.
They’ve been marketing Olympia and a few legacy brands and contract brewing for craft brands for bit.
Think they work out of a legacy Brewery in Chicago. Believe they still own the original Olympia facility and plans to reopen it were delayed by Covid.
Pabst snapped up a few brands like this that still owned space or operating breweries after a fight with Miller over their contract to produce.
Yes the specific family member who runs the brewery went full Trump. Gave a speech to his mostly Hispanic employees, in front of their kids, at the company picnic. About how Trump was gonna send back all the Mexicans and make America for white people again.
The rest of the family basically disowned him over that.
So you can safely buy the ice cream and barbecue sauce. Which have no real association with the brewery outside the name and the ability to use the logo.
Absolutely. If they’re headquartered more than a few hundred miles from where you’re consuming it, it’s almost certainly made under contract by a regional brewer.
I honestly think contract brewers have been a great boon to the industry. It allows for really remarkable brewers to sell their products all over the country while ensuring a fresh, stable product. It used to be that any time I was on the west coast I would make a point of having a Fat Tire. Now I can get it in my local store! Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the 1554 out here yet.
Oh, I wasn’t. I was just trying to add nuance to the discussion. I am quite fond of a Narragansett every now and again. Interestingly, NY has a special class of license for Farm Distilleries/Breweries/Wineries and Cideries that allows for only NY-produced products to be sold (it’s an exceptionally generous license in every other regard and the intent is to benefit NY farmers directly). My buddy’s distillery sells Naragansett tall boys because they’re produced in Rochester. Unfortunately, he recently passed, so those of us who worked with him raised a few in his honor (RIP, Gable).
I think I’ll slip out a grab a six pack right now!
It’s not even that. Many craft brands only exist on a contract or gypsy brew basis. And it’s insanely common for even places that only self distribute to contract brew to increase volume as they scale. Space and equipment are expensive and there’s a lot of competition these days.
Increasingly it looks like operating a contract brew facility is the only stable move in the beer business. Many of the fastest growing craft brands nationally either grew out of contract breweries, or were started by people who left one.
Consolidation is coming one way or another, and I really think it’s the contract breweries that will kick up the next set of bigger companies.
New Belgium are currently owned by Kirin, through a complex chain of Australian subsidiaries.
From what I understand they never did much contract brewing before that. They opened their Ashville location to supply the East Coast to avoid it. After they were bought the plan seemed to be, to an extent, to open a chain of brew pubs.
I don’t believe they’ve been owned long enough to start having product produced in corporate facilities, but they’re basically available globally now.
NY has a special class of license for Farm Distilleries/Breweries/Wineries and Cideries that allows for only NY-produced products to be sold
It also comes with requirements to use a certain percentage of NY grown ingredients. Which is well and good for the vineyard wineries it was meant for. But causes issues in beer and distilling because not enough barley and hops are grown in NY to hit the percentages as they ramp up. It’s kinda just increased the cost of producing here, which is already hampering things.
On the other end of it a licensed tasting room on a normal production license can usually just sell any products it’d like within what it’s licensed to retail. So it’s sort of become a cheap avenue for a full on-prem license and a bit of a boondoggle.
Here we have a massive cidery that doesn’t actually make any cider, it’s all contract brewed despite being one of the largest brew floors in the area. Their big space is primarily used as warehouse for the food wholesaler they also own. And they farm nothing, they just bought a chunk of agriculturally zoned land.
There’s also a large farm brewery, the farm its on is a very large nursery operation. Primarily growing trees for sale out of state, and sod.
They do brew on site, but as with the cidery it’s predominantly run as a tourist trap for tourist dollars.
And that seems to be the overall impact of such licenses. The same approach has been devastating to the wineries here. The operating costs are high here so their products are not cost competitive in distribution, originally they could not whole sale out of state, and their license class makes scaling very difficult. So they’ve all started getting snapped up by very big wine companies out of California and Europe and they basically run as catering halls and tourist destinations now.
Down turns in tourism and lots of competition from all the other sorts of tasting rooms and brew pubs, ever more restaurants have made the whole tasting room thing pretty dodgy. And that whole group of licenses was designed to foster that.
It has helped make hop farming a thing here, a little bit. Like 3 guys growing a few acres. But I don’t think it’s really helping farmers all that much, and I don’t think it’s pushing alcohol production in a particularly healthy direction.
Any time you take a look at “producing goods” and think “wouldn’t this be better as a tourist destination”, you kinda lost the thread.
That’s not really true, it’s a myth that’s been flogged by people who want the liberties of the license without actually adhering to the demands of the license. There are at least two other licenses in each class that allow producers to buy from literally anywhere on the planet, but you have to go through the traditional three tier system just like in every other state (production, distribution, retail). NY went from zero maltsters to 13 since about 2012 (at my last count) and there is actually an abundance of product. They’re more expensive, but that’s the bargain for retaining all of the margin that would go to distro; again, a producer has many choices for the license class they apply for. Hops are a different issue because frankly, trying to grow a flower with quantifiable properties in the humid northeast is not a great proposition. However, none of the licenses demand 100% NY state production and a brewer can easily use their out of state allowance for all of their hops bill if needed as it is a very small percentage of overall volume by weight. There are also ample carve outs for “acts of god” that ruin a particular year’s crop.
ETA: NY also allows concurrency of licenses, so even if someone holds a Farm license, they can easily obtain and A1 or similar license and hold it at the same time and enjoy they benefits of both. Really, any issues with these licenses are of the holders own making in my experience.
The Farm licenses were never meant to indicate that the product was being produced by a farm, rather that the producer was adhering to Ag & Markets guidance that brewing et al are intrinsically agricultural processes and are thereby “use by right”. A Farm producer can exist in the middle of Manhattan as long as they’re buying the majority of their product from NY farms.
It’s also important to note that, although NY created the Farm licenses, many states have adopted similar, but diluted language that has created a lot of the issues you mention. 100% of the issues in NY arise from people trying to exploit the license and getting grumpy when they realize they can’t manipulate the SLA or working with small farms carries a burden of partnership they didn’t count on.
Yep. And those are the people who are having issues. As they should.
Which, let’s be honest, is the business model of 90% of wineries regardless of license type. They sure aren’t profiting off of the grapes.
No, it was designed to foster agricultural diversity and crop resiliency. I know because I was on the advisory committee and worked at the distillery that drafted the legislation.
Again, the producers who are looking to exploit the license are creating exploitative situations, for sure. But I personally have worked with hundreds of small farms who would disagree. They have leveraged the situation to bring resiliency and diversity to their farms while selling at market rates (as opposed to commodity rates), develop on-farm infrastructure and develop long-term partnerships that exist outside of the fluctuations of the commodities market. To wit: I advise my clients to offer their farmers market rate per acre as opposed to test weight. This means that the farmer can take risks on crops that will require adaptation and infrastructure while ensuring they get paid regardless of yield, essentially shielding them from risks. Of course, I won’t even field inquiries from wannabe producers who have other intentions, so I am shielded from the nefarious outcomes somewhat.
Exactly. I’ve always been highly skeptical of the hops angle even though there are a few producers who are putting out credible product. But NY is never going to be a premier hop growing region again. There’s a reason hops production went from first in the nation to nonexistent here.
Also… do I know you? Sounds like we swim in neighboring waters.
My dad and grandparents had the State Management Scheme, which only applied in the area around Carlisle and Gretna because of the large munitions factory nearby.
Because the government didn’t want a black market in alcohol from Glasgow, Newcastle and Manchester, the brewery had to make sure that their weaker beer was good. Then the government sort of forgot that it was there for fifty years. I’m sure that it being one of the profitable nationalised industries helped.
When it was privatised in the 1970s the locals protested but it was all sold off to large breweries, who then got rid of the local beers because “there was no market for them”. There have been recent attempts by independent breweries to reintroduce the state management beers, but I’m not really a beer drinker and I don’t go back to Carlisle often.
It’s something producers I work with have quoted me numbers for.
Exactly my point. The relatively low production leads to high prices. Which makes overall production cost higher. And production cost in NY is already causing producers issues. Particularly down state. Part of the issue on that end is these products are desirable for producers on other licenses as well, if only because they can impact access to selling to those locations. Which is a weirdly important peg for small and new operations.
Sort of. NY lets producers on all license classes self distribute as well as direct retail below a certain scale. Like most states. It’s really only the wineries, and these special class licenses like the “farm” licenses that tie it to selling NY products and using NY ingredients.
Keeping the piece from wholesale sounds very good, and actually does work at a certain scale. But at a certain point it cuts you off from increasing sales volume. It’s a pretty big practical barrier to expanding your distribution area, and in most states prevents you from exporting across state lines.
It’s the very old margin vs volume situation. A lot more volume at a lower margin is usually a lot more money.
Farm brewery license quotes both hops and grains as separate categories. Escalates to 90% of hops and 90% of all other ingredients in 2024.
It currently sits at 60%, and you can not hit the mark by using 100% NY hops. Because it’s 60% of hops and 60% of all other ingredients.
They’re actually making more money than most. And checking every legal box, with deep pockets to buy 90% of their ingredients from NY going forward.
Maybe I’m a bit jaded on this whole thing because I’ve seen how a similar approach helped nuked my home town and narrowed wine production into a tourist only business. Wineries in this state aren’t that narrowly focused on tourism by chance. Tourism is NY’s biggest industry and much of the regulation around this stuff is cryptically directed at fostering that.
What looked promising here in exactly the same way you’re describing turned into mostly tipped service jobs, most of the farmers who initially benefited have been replaced by well off transplants raising luxury products as a second career. And luxury housing. Also goat yoga “in the vines”.
Hell every 3rd sentence out of Cuomo’s mouth during his COVID pressers was about visiting our parks and beaches and wineries and breweries.
I know the people growing hops near me quite well. They aren’t, mostly. Their hops don’t sell outside of NY state, because they aren’t priced competitively and they’ve managed to make some money off of it because of direct sale relationships with local operations. Planting more of their fields with hops wouldn’t contribute much more because the other crops bring in more and can sell in other areas. It’s pretty small add on that basically lets them plant off kilter shaped parts of their farms with minimal added labor.
The biggest operation going is actually the sales manager for one of the local breweries. Who buy the vast majority of his crop.
No one here who has planted barely has done well with it at all. Most give it up after a season. The math is a little different upstate where land is much cheaper and there’s more of it.
And like I said, I seen this before. The scheme here is weaker here than it was when wineries kicked off. Partially because it fucked the wine business so bad.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea, it just needs some tweaking cause a lot of what we’re talking about is the same cycle wine making went through, and I’m seeing a lot of the same dynamics that caused that to curdle. On a much broader scale. I just don’t think it’s a particularly sustainable path to follow long term, nor do I think the market creation aspect is really the primary goal.
IIRC correctly we work on opposite ends of the state and opposite ends of the business.
But like I said my trash talking here is more rooted in how these same promises “saved” my home town by turning it into an unlivable tourist trap. And the way breweries and distilleries are slotting slow nicely into that, with these farm licenses mostly acting to proliferate tasting rooms in that market. Rather than actual production.
